But this time there was no sound at all.
He looked at his Chop Shooter alarm clock, but it had stopped at half-past three. Great. He walked out onto the landing, calling downstairs. "Mum? Dad?" No smell of breakfast, no sound of TV.
He went into his parent's bedroom and stopped. Maybe he'd just woken up too early, because there were two shapes under the covers – Mum and Dad were still in bed.
Yeah, but it was daylight?
Ian walked around the room towards the head of the bed, trying to ignore the prickling all over his his skin. This was scary, and he could feel the pee building up in his winkle, but he kept on walking.
At the head of the bed, he cautiously lifted up the covers –
"URH, URH, URH, URH – "
Running out of the room, dry-retching, wailing, weeping, battering the walls with his tiny fists. It wasn't just the sight of Ken and Barbie, because he'd only had a quick glimpse. It was the smell of the burning. It was the smell that got him, made him bang the walls and scream nonsense at the top of his voice.
And then the walls opened, and the Dream Mechanics reached through to gently pick him up, saying, It's all right, Ian. Everything is all right. You've done very well.
We'll take that nasty smell away.
*
But that was all a long time ago, yesterday.
Ian had passed his test with flying colours and had earned his place as the new Grandfather: official title, Greatest Player of Games and King of the Land of Nod. On his Coronation Day, all the children came from every shadowed corner of the kingdom, from the Castle of Indolence to the Wooden Hills of Bedfordshire. The Cinderellas, the princes, the witches and the woodcutters, the astronauts and the aliens, not forgetting nasty old Johnny Shoxx and his army of zombie mooks. All the children of Morpheus stopped what they were doing and rushed to the Palace ballroom to greet their new King.
Heigh, Ho, time creeps but slow
Ian sat there, in his coronation robes, looking around him. The Dream Mechanics had placed a gold crown around his brow, and ceremonially taken away his liver and one kidney. The Mayor of the Land of Nod – a tangled skein of doll-parts, held together with mucus – presented him with the Key to the Kingdom, gold and shiny upon a cushion of dusty velvet.
I've looked up the hill so long
In the Palace ballroom his subjects danced a waltz to thin, reedish flutes and splintered violins. Around they spun in sedate, courtly circles, like slow-motion dervishes, their feet invisible beneath skirts and robes that brushed the floor, saluting their partners with stiff, angular gestures.
None come this way, the sun sinks low,
And my shadow's so very long
From his grotesquely sculpted throne, Ian watched them all. His face was almost as white as the bone-china masks of the Dream Mechanics who stood guard beside him. His jaw worked as he slowly ground his teeth together, his eyes darting around in swift, bird-like glances. On his head, the oversized crown wobbled but stayed in place.
They said I should see a Fairie town,
With houses all of gold
Outside the hall, away from the warmth and the music, the darkness stretched in all directions. On and on, and on, full of flickering shadows, voices that went unheard, faces that went unseen. A land full of people who weren't there.
And silver people, and a gold church steeple
But it wasn't the truth they told…
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: or…
"THE SWIPES"
Labels. What exactly are they for? Why do some people hate them so much? Why do others get so obsessed with them?
For me, these questions regarding the importance of labels in literature – or lack of it – began with my discovery of SF author William Gibson. I read his novel Neuromancer in 1987, and it gave me a headrush that I hadn't felt since reading The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, when I was nineteen years old.
Gibson, along with other writers such as Bruce Sterling and K W Jeter, had created what SF readers called an entirely new genre. Their novels combined advanced computer technology, specifically artificial intelligence and virtual reality, with breakdowns in social order and economic chaos. The effect was to create a dystopian, hard-boiled noir future world where the heroes were flawed loners fighting giant, faceless corporations operating solely for profit. This new genre became known as 'Cyberpunk'.
I became a voracious reader of anything remotely related to 'Cyberpunk', so you can imagine my surprise and intrigue when I learned of the existence of something called 'Steampunk', associated yet again with…William Gibson. "The Difference Engine", by Gibson and co-author Bruce Sterling, was a novel that codified a new genre – taking the Cyberpunk tropes and setting them in the Victorian age, creating an alternative history where computers were created in the 1800's. Gibson and Sterling weren't the first to do this; other authors, such as John Blaylock and Tim Powers, were already experimenting along the same lines. The success of The Difference Engine, however, cleared the way for the growing Steampunk movement, and spawned a number of other sub-genres welding the Cyberpunk look and feel onto different technologies, environments and historical settings. They can be defined chronologically (Sandalpunk, Clockpunk, Dieselpunk, Atompunk) or technologically (Biopunk, Nanopunk, Apunkalypse).
The effect has been to polarize the reading community. A large number of readers have grown tired of this 'punk' pigeonholing. Some feel that adding the suffix 'punk' to a certain genre and so creating a sub-genre is unnecessary and ridiculous, and also symptomatic of the literature market's need to pigeonhole everything to render it easier for consumption.
So where do I stand? For the purpose of explaining the concept of Tales From Beyond Tomorrow, I officially state here that I have no problem with using these labels, but I am in no way serious about them and they can be quite happily ignored. They're here to have fun with; that's all.
So, here I present The Futurist Manifesto. This is a series of alternative history short stories and novelettes set during the 19th and 20th centuries. They are also available on Amazon as 'e-shorts', without the illustrations, to promote this collection. While reading, you'll find events, characters, and themes which correspond to other stories in The Futurist Manifesto – and yes, that's deliberate, this is all taking place in a shared universe. I'll pick up on this in the acknowledgements below.
Now, to the individual stories!
THE FUTURIST MANIFESTO
THE INVENTION OF GOD
The term 'Steampunk', defined above, has drawn a lot of attention in the last few years.
Recently, I have noticed a lot of groups and clubs and societies emerging, but most of them seen to be concerned with Steampunk as fashion. In fact, most of them are bordering on that kind of behavior known to the Japanese as 'cosplay'. Although I said in the preface I am not serious about pigeonholing fiction, I will say that I personally regard Steampunk as not fashion, but literature. The movement started with K. W. Jeter, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling, taking their inspiration from the classic contemporary works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. In writing The Invention of God, I have attempted to return Steampunk to its original tropes, as a spiritual successor to Cyberpunk. To me, that means a blend of science fiction with film noir, where high technology rubs shoulders with grinding poverty. The world is run by vastly powerful business/colonial interests, and the protagonists are flawed, lonely anti-heroes surviving on the fringes of society, trying to strike a blow against the authorities that cast them down, using the very same technology that the dominators need to keep themselves in power. That means I am also indebted to William Gibson, and sharp-eyed readers will note the homages to Neuromancer and Burning Chrome, and I admit they are entirely deliberate.
Also, you might be interested to know that John Murray Spear was a real historical person, and so was his church and his beliefs! For the research, I am indebted to the in-depth article John Murray Spear's God Machine, by Robert Damon Schneck, published in the May 2002 editio
n of the Fortean Times. I am also indebted to the extremely strange but well-written story The New Motor by M. Christian, which has been the only fictional exploration of the life of John Murray Spear (until now). M. Christian is the leading exponent of the literary subgenre known as 'technorotica', which is well worth investigating…if you like that sort of thing (ahem).
DULCE ET DECORUM EST
In writing the second story of the series, I would like here to acknowledge the influence of Wilfred Owen and the many other War Poets, who expressed their humanity under unbelievably inhumane conditions.
Arthur Machen was the author of the short story The Bowmen, which most people feel started the 'Angels of Mons' phenomenon.
There is also: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the main creator of Futurism.
Wyndham Lewis, genius trouble-maker, main creator of Vorticism, and the editor of 'Blast!' magazine.
Ford Madox Ford, the author of the Parade's End tetralogy.
James Joyce, Virgina Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and countless writers and artists of the Modernist movement.
Paul Morley, Trevor Horn and Jill Sinclair, founders of the record label ZTT (a homage to the sound poem Zang Tumb Tumb by the aforementioned Marinetti) and the band The Art of Noise (a homage to the manifesto The Art of Noises by Futurist artist and composer Luigi Russolo).
Skids, and the album Days in Europa.
Steve Hackett, and the album Spectral Mornings.
Virgina Astley, and the album From Gardens Where We Feel Secure.
THE ELEMENTS OF WAR
The third story in the series is a tale of love and magic set during the London Blitz, and is the most personal story in this collection. This story is dedicated to my parents, Frederick William Catton and Florence Catton, and is inspired by their experiences in wartime London. Having said that, this is a work of fiction, and although my parents did meet in London during the war (and their story is the story of a wartime romance) the lives of Frankie Cooper and Elizabeth Hague bear only the faintest resemblance to my parents' experience. This is just my way of saying that what my parents lived through will never be forgotten.
Neither my mother nor father worked at St. Bart's. My father was a pathologist's assistant, and was sent to all kinds of places during the hostilities. He was seconded to the Canadian Navy at the beginning of the War, and served at Scapa Flow, in the Orkney Islands; he worked in Southampton, with the Royal Navy; his experiences in London were mainly at St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington. After V. E. Day, he worked at the Royal Center for Nervous Diseases in Russell Square, conducting research on how British troops would cope with tropical conditions while fighting the Japanese. Part of his work involved the construction of a simulated rainforest in the center of London. He would often tell me of this when I was a child, and he would always drop in the happy aside – "John, I was on tropical pay!"
My mother was born in Gateshead, Newcastle, and worked as a nurse in Newcastle Hospital from 1939 to 1942. She came to London as a district nurse and worked at Willesden Green as a member of the Queen's Institute of District Nursing.
My mother and father met at a Forces Club night at the Waldorf Hotel. They were both in uniform; my father held the official rank of Petty Officer in the Royal Navy. He asked her for a dance, and she accepted…so I suppose that night Angels were dining at the Waldorf, as well as the Ritz.
They were engaged at the church of St. Martin in the Fields, London, in 1945, and married in Gateshead in 1947.
I am indebted to a great deal of research on the subject of the Blitz. Among the works I consulted were:
The BBC "People's War" Archives.
"The World at War" magazine.
Murder on the Home Front – the memoir of Molly Lefebure, a reporter seconded to the London pathologist Keith Simpson from 1940 to 1945.
Fireweed, by Jill Paton Walsh.
The Ministry of Fear and The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene.
The Facts of Life, by Graham Joyce –an excellent novel set in Coventry during and after the war.
Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, by Michael Peppiat.
Interviews with Francis Bacon, by David Sylvester.
Secrets of a Golden Dawn Temple, by Chic Cicero and Sandra Tabatha Cicero.
Liber AL vel Legis sub figura CCXX: The Book of the Law, by Aleister Crowley.
The Magical Record of the Beast 666, by Aleister Crowley.
Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, by Kenneth Grant.
The staff of Kitazawa Antiquarian Books, Jimbocho, Tokyo, for their invaluable help and advice.
JIMMY DIAMOND AND THE GIRL FROM VENUS
This is my take on the sub-genre of alternative history known as 'Atompunk' or – to use the rather poetic term that I prefer – 'Raygun Gothic'. This label was created by William Gibson in The Gernsback Continuum, a short story that created and succinctly defined the sub-genre (the story can be found in the collection Burning Chrome). I must say that I use this label only in a spurious sense, as a pigeonhole that offers an excuse to play around with the images and tropes of the historical period, and not a classification to be taken seriously. Indeed, after the heavy tone of The Elements of War, this next story in the sequence is a light-hearted romantic SF comedy to lighten the mood.
In the research and writing of this story, I am indebted to a number of sources.
First, I would like to thank the entire output of the British film industry from 1960 to 1966.
Quadrophenia, the album and film created by The Who, and composed by Pete Townshend.
Absolute Beginners, by Colin MacInnes.
Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene.
The Ipcress File, by Len Deighton.
The Quiller Memorandum, by Adam Hall.
The Callan TV series, created by James Mitchell.
The Suedehead novels, by Richard Allen.
Die Hard Mod, by Charlie McQuaker.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, by Alan Sillitoe.
The TV series of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson.
The Avengers TV series, created by Sydney Newman and Brain Clemens.
William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton as Doctor Who.
The music of John Barry and Ron Grainer.
The Magnus, Robot Fighter Comics, from Gold Key.
The work of Kim Newman, particularly the Anno Dracula series, and the short stories Tomorrow Town and The Big Fish.
The Space Age, by Steve Lyons.
Gordon Moir, Daddy-O Nov, Warren Peace, and all Mods, Modettes, Rockers, Rude Boys, Fly Girls, Skinheads, Suedeheads everywhere.
Although this story is dedicated to Michael Caine, special mention must go to Tony Beckley, the Ace Face extraordinaire (1929 – 1980).
NIGHTFALL IN UTOPIA
When I was compiling a list of stories for the first volume of Tales from Beyond Tomorrow I noticed something; the stories were too London-centric. Considering the impact the USA has had upon global culture in general, and me specifically, I felt that the series ought to reflect this. I had planned stories for Volume Two, set in the Old West, but what the collection needed was a story set in a major American city.
New York City was the obvious choice; I've had a fascination for the place ever since Spider-Man made his home there in 1962. I started doing research on which particular part of the 20th Century I could make the setting, and I recalled the famous blackout of 1977 – an event that has never been adequately explained. Then I found out the blackout occurred on the same day as the "Manhattanhenge" phenomenon…and after that, the story just wrote itself. Continuing the theme of Modernism in art and architecture, I came up with the title Nightfall in Utopia.
Readers will notice the countless homages to Marvel and DC comics in the story. To be honest, the influences were mainly Marvel during the so-called Bronze Age of comics, and titles such as "Heroes for Hire", "Tomb of Dracula", "Werewolf by Night", "Morbius the Living Vampire", and "Deathlok the Demolisher".
Also…
The Shock of
the New, by Robert Hughes.
The audio CD Bauhaus Reviewed, by LTM Records.
Darkfall, by Stephen Laws.
Gridiron, by Philip Kerr.
Dozens of TV cop shows from the period.
For the research into the specific circumstances of the 1977 power cut and its aftermath, I am deeply indebted to the book Blackout by James Goodman, pub. North Point Press (a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2003. It was an invaluable resource and if anyone is interested in further reading on the subject, I totally recommend it.
SKIN CONDITION
This is the sixth story in the series, and strangely enough, one of the oldest stories in this collection (written long before the concept for the series existed). I first wrote Skin Condition in either 1989 or 1990, as a reaction to both living in Thatcher's Britain and reading William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. I was fascinated by the concept of Cyberpunk. I still am fascinated by it, but in a different way; when I re-read books by such luminaries as Gibson himself, John Brunner, K. W. Jeter, Bruce Sterling, Richard Kadrey, Jack Womack and others, and when I re-watch films like Blade Runner and TV series like Max Headroom and Bugs, I'm intrigued by what they got right as well as what they overlooked.
I owe a huge debt to such artists and creators, and I will forever be in their debt. Skin Condition has been extensively re-written, but certain parts have been left as they were to retain the atmosphere. It's being published here in its new form for the first time.
WORD SALAD
THE BLOODY TOURIST
This is my September 11th story, written after that event and an end-of-year trip to Barcelona.
Tales From Beyond Tomorrow: Volume One Page 25